There was a time that Starmade had extraordinary promise. It had the potential to be the perfect meld between a highly nuanced building game of extraordinary tactical depth, a first person space RPG, and a grand space strategy game. That potential was still a long way off given that it is a VERY small team building the game. In the mean time however, the building part of the game was quite finely honed and functional and much fun could be had gaining even more expertise in ship building. There were still bugs and optimizations to work out, but the future looked very bright indeed.
Then instead of building upon that base and starting to flesh out the rest of the game so the ships we build had something to do other than get materials for more ships, instead the developers decided to scrap the entire building system and start it over from essentially scratch. The extremely complex block building mechanics were still there, it would still take you days of work to pile all the blocks together to get a ship working, but virtually all the tactical depth of decision making in building was removed. The actual game mechanics of the build system has been dumbed down so much, that it is barely more sophisticated than most other space strategy games. The difference is that those other space strategy games do NOT require you to master an incredibly obtuse construction system that requires you to spend days piling blocks.
This recent change has caused ALL of the literally thousands of ships and stations posted to community content to be utterly obsolete. Everything is now scrap. Everything will have to be rebuilt. The product of literally hundreds of thousands of man hours has been wasted. All so that the build system can be dumbed down to the point that even the most casual of gamer can easily understand the ship mechanics.
(Choose the size of ship you want. Decide if you are willing to hugely sacrifice performance and stick with a long narrow ship, or worse a 'normal' looking ship, or go for a seriously weird oblique ship for maximum power. Decide on which weapon configuration you will use and how much of them. Decide how much shield, regenerators and thrusters you will use. Decide how you will allocate your ten chamber points. Then spend 100 hours piling blocks. That's it, that's ship building now.)
I'll spare you the details of such as; how in so doing they have not just reduced the tactical depth of building choices, but also forced some truly bizarre ship design choices upon players. There IS an optimum ship shape that is so utterly bizarre that NO science fiction artist has ever thought to draw or paint, because no one would ever build a ship that way. But in Starmade, that is now the optimum ship.
They have thrown their baby out with the bath water. Rather than take the one thing they had working, the thing that was the most extraordinary in all of gaming when it came to build systems, and finish the rest of the game. Instead they scrapped it and are basically starting over with a VASTLY inferior system. At this point it looks like the actual game part, the grand strategy part, will likely never be done. They will have to spend years tweaking, bug fixing and balancing their new, inferior build system first.
I used to love the richness of the old build system and looked forward to expanding it into the strategy game proper. Now I hate the new build system and I expect we will never see the strategy game. I could not possibly more strongly NOT recommend this game at this point.
